The last couple days flew by in a whirlwind of packing, cleaning the lab, hosting my 2nd PolarTREC webinar and participating in Gary Wesche's second one, as well as saying "see you later" to all the wonderful friends I met in McMurdo and dreaming up plans for my first couple weeks back in the "real world."
Yesterday afternoon, I left McMurdo on a C-130 military cargo plane along with 87 other people who are either finished with their time on the Ice for the season, or are taking a short vacation in New Zealand before heading back to Antarctica to spend the winter continuing to keep the Station running and science progressing.
After the 5 hour journey from McMurdo, Antarctica to Christchurch, New Zealand, the first things I noticed were the color of the sky- all dusky...
I introduced you to one of the buildings in McMurdo Station a couple days ago, Building #1, the Crary Lab. While there are absolutely important and vital events occurring at Crary every single day, there is one building I give higher importance to in this town, Building 155. Building 155 is the hub of this community- there are living quarters, finance, housing, and recreation offices, a computer room with internet access, a craft room, the store, and most importantly, the galley. The amazing chefs, bakers, prep cooks, dining assistants, and supervisors that keep the people of McMurdo happy by keeping our bellies replete with delicious food are so tremendously appreciated by myself and the rest of the Town. The galley serves four meals a day- breakfast, lunch, dinner, and "mid-rats,...
This is the shortest journal I plan to write, aside from the few days when I did not write at all!
I am nearing the end of this trip to Antarctica, and I am pretty busy with all the last minute items on my ever-growing "To Do" list. The DOM team arrived at Crary Lab to a completely empty lab space and somehow or other filled up shelves, drawers, counters, fridges, and freezers with countless science tools and pieces of equipment. By the time we leave, the lab must look as it did on our first day here- with no sign of the DOM team, except the project number on the door. There are items to pack into storage that need to remain warm over the cold Antarctic winter and others to box up and place in a huge cardboard container outside. The samples need inventorying and careful packing...
The DOM team is beginning to close up our Antarctic science lab for winter, as we get ready to depart this beautiful continent in just four days. Heidi and I compiled lists of all the Cotton Glacier and Canada Glacier water samples. Heidi, Mike, and Collin are carefully packaging up samples for shipment back to Montana State and Ohio State Universities for further testing. I am making sure all borrowed equipment returns to the correct department around McMurdo- science stuff to the Crary Supply Center and camping and field gear to the Berg Field Center. It is a bit of a bittersweet time- I think all of the remaining DOM team members are excited to return to our homes, but sad to end this experience.
Collin carefully packing samples. While, in the foreground, sediment samples are bagged,...
The stage is built, the instruments in tune, the speakers wired, and the McMurdo crowd is ready to rock Ice Stock!
The mainstage.
This is the tenth year of the Ice Stock Music Festival at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Groups of talented amateur musicians all around the station form bands or practice on their own in preparation for this one-day celebration. There are ladies playing ukuleles (they call themselves the "Ukaladies"), folk singers, reggae-ska groups, an awesome 70's disco cover band, classical musicians, jazz trios, and a little bit of everything in between. In true festival style, booths are set up around the concert area to provide coffee (from Sawbucks Coffee), for artists to sell their wares, and for the Mt. Terror Rugby team to feed the masses chili, burgers,...
Happy Antarctic New Years Eve!
Holly is a wonderful person to ring in the New Year with! He is such a patient and tremendous help to all the scientists (an PolarTRECers) that come though McMurdo Station. Holly, along with the other IT geniuses, Brody and Deke, keep computers running even if they were dropped into Mt. Erebus' crater, or bounced out of a backpack in the Dry Valleys.
Holly is also very fascinating to talk to- his knowledge about life in Antarctica and advice on what to do and see in McMurdo has helped me get so much more out of my time in "Town." Thanks Holly!
To continue with the science journals, I would like to talk a little about another tool the DOM team uses to study, on a molecular level, the dissolved organic matter we collect in the water samples from the streams at the Cotton and Canada Glaciers. Already, I have shared information on a few biological tests we run on the water samples- Chlorophyll-a extraction and fluorescence (Dec. 11) and Bacterial Production (BP) by 3H (Tritiated) Thymidine Incorporation (Dec. 19), and one on a way in which we concentrate the water and DOM using Reverse Osmosis (Dec. 23). Today is all about "seeing" the DOM using UV-Vis Spectrophotometry.
UV-Vis Spectrophotometry:
The DOM team uses a dual-beam UV-Vis spectrophotometer to measure the light absorbed by molecules suspended in our water...
The beautiful snow McMurdo is blanketed by has forced the DOM team into a couple days of quiet time- a chance to tie up loose ends with some data collection, begin to clean and box up the lab for the winter, organize samples, and rest. It is a well-deserved couple of days as Collin, Mike, and Heidi wait for the snow to stop falling long enough for them to take a helicopter out to the Cotton Glacier for the final sampling trip of the season.
I used this time to answer quite a few very wonderful questions sent to the Ask the Team section of this PolarTREC site. Thanks to all of you who shared their curiosity with the rest of the Polar Enthusiasts! One of the questions I received asked about the shape of the Weddell Seals teeth and how it helped them chew through the sea ice to maintain...
Michael is the only person in Antarctica I knew of prior to coming to the Ice. He is a great friend of my cousin, Nathan. Thanks to the wonderful online time-sucker called Facebook, Michael and I started chatting virtually before I left the States.
Michael is nearing the end of his first contract as a GA (general assistant) in McMurdo, but unlike most GAs he is not leaving in February. He recently signed on to winter-over in McMurdo. His job in the winter is to help with the maintenance of McMurdo's many buildings. He is supposed to leave McMurdo next October, but is hoping to stay around for another Antarctic summer.
Happy day-after Christmas to all of you in the States and elsewhere on your side of the International Date Line! I took a few days off from journal writing to celebrate the holidays with the rest of the wonderful and creative McMurdo community. (Are we called McMurdians? Or McMurdoites? What do you think?) In this journal, I am going to whirl you through the last few days of holiday cheer Antarctic-style.
December 23rd-
On Wednesday night, I went to the Chapel of the Snows, the world's southernmost building erected primarily for religious services, to see a performance of A Charlie Brown Christmas. I believe the play, put on by a dedicated group of amateur thespians, is almost as great as the Charles Schultz holiday cartoon classic. I loved their creative use of materials found around...
When I talk to people around McMurdo, or classrooms of fabulous Polar Enthusiasts back in the States, I always describe dissolved organic matter (DOM) very simply as microscopic bits of organic matter that are suspended in liquid or frozen water. Now that I have worked with the DOM team in Antarctica for over a month collecting samples of water and preparing the water in a variety of ways to test for DOM and microbes, my understanding of DOM has deepened. Today, Yo helped me understand even more by creating a great analogy to describe DOM and why we use systems such as those on the Cotton Glacier to study this abundant source of organic matter.
If I was to take my very simple description, "microscopic bits of organic stuff suspended in water," and change just a few words to,...
During the summer months, of which we are in the middle of right now, the population at McMurdo Station climbs above 1000 people. Not everyone on the station is involved directly with a science expedition. From what I understand, for every scientist there are 5 people working at the Station in support positions. If it was not for these wonderful people the Polar researchers could not throw themselves so wholeheartedly into their research. There are carpenters, cooks, engineers, weathermen, firefighters, doctors and nurses, shuttle drivers, helicopter and airplane pilots, and so on. This is a town and it takes many people to keep it running so smoothly. The people who work on Station typically work hours similar to folks up in the States, 8-9 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. In their down...
I find myself lucky that a lot of Antarctic history lies in regions of this fascinating continent that I have visited. In 1903, R.F. Scott discovered the Dry Valleys and described them in his journals. One of the lines he wrote about his discovery still rings true with the few people who have a chance to visit the area, "I cannot but think that this valley is a very wonderful place." A simple, but perfect description for an area I called "home" for almost a week.
Chip, Collin, Yo, Christine, Sarah, Mike, Heidi.
History surrounds McMurdo Station, too. Around McMurdo Station there are buildings erected and used over a century ago by some of the most famous Polar explorers. In 1902, before Robert F. Scott happened upon the Dry Valleys, he set up his base of operations...
The DOM team is getting into a great groove in the Crary Lab at McMurdo Station. Christine, Heidi, and Birgit are running biological tests on water samples while Chip, Collin, Yo, and Mike work on chemical analyses. I pitch in when and where I can and I love learning so many new techniques and ideas. We are excited to see the fruits of our field sampling labor ripening into great data.
Today I would like to introduce you to another one of the tests we perform on the sampled water and the purpose behind the analysis.
Bacterial Production (BP) by 3H (Tritiated) Thymidine Incorporation:
Before I begin to describe the BP test, let me start with a brief description on the structure of one of the greatest "building blocks" of life, deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA). Think of DNA as the...
One of the most exciting tools the DOM team has at the Crary Lab is designed and built by one of our very own team members, Chip Kilduff. Chip built a reverse osmosis (RO) instrument that separates out all the dissolved material in our water samples that is smaller than 0.45 micrometers (µm), or 0.00000045 meters (m). The goal of our RO is to remove the excess water down to a point where the dissolved organic matter that is smaller than 0.45µm is concentrated enough to measure. Filtering out everything larger than 0.45µm removes all the "big" stuff like bacteria from the water samples, leaving only the truly dissolved material like dissolved organic matter. This DOM concentrated water is run through a variety of tests to help the DOM team determine the chemical composition of...
Please give Birgit Sattler a loud, welcoming "griassdi" ("hello" in the Austrian-German dialect), the international element of the DOM team. Birgit is very well versed in Polar Science as she studies frozen environments and high altitude regions in her native land of Austria, as well as in the Arctic and Antarctica. She is interested in understanding what occurs on a microbial scale in this areas and how it exemplifies or models life on a more global scale.
Birgit is leaving Antarctica tomorrow and all of the DOM team will miss her terribly. Out at the Lake Fryxell camp she was not only fully involved in all the scientific sampling we did, but she also made delicious dinners and desserts. Her stories of expeditions around the world kept the camp ringing with laughter. I know I have made a...
Yo is an amazing scientist in the lab and in the field. Wherever his scientific curiosity takes him, he allows himself to become completely carried away. He has a passion for understanding the nuances of dissolved organic matter. Also, he has a great affinity for teaching others about his scientific loves. He goes so far as to "adopt" his graduate students into his family. Collin is one such adoptee of Yo's family.
Some of Yo's academic family.
Yo's exhibits the same intensity for the other passions in his life- his wife and daughters, fly-fishing and woodworking. During a conversation with Yo, you hear a sprinkling of all his passions described either in stories, examples, or analogies.
Yo, fly-fishing on his family's property.
Enjoy this brief look into Yo's life...
With tires almost as tall as me, this beast of a bus shuttles the people of McMurdo to and fro.
Today, I took a field trip with my McMurdo roommate, Debbie, out to her research site on the Ross Ice Shelf. Debbie works for the NASA Balloon Program and is in Antarctica to manage a project that launched a large, unmanned balloon into the upper limits of Earth's atmosphere. Other teams, like Debbie's are launching other balloons and instruments from the same site this season. Once in the air, the balloons orbit the Earth collecting data through the scientific equipment that is contained in payloads hanging below them. Scientists at NASA and Universities around the U.S. use the data to learn more about outer space and near space.
I was very fortunate in that a balloon launch was scheduled to...
Please say "hello" to Chip, the DOM team's engineer extraordinaire! Chip arrived at McMurdo on the same day as the rest of the team took off for Lake Fryxell. While we were at Lake Fryxell, Chip was busy completing adjustments to this amazing Reverse Osmosis machine he designed and built himself. Stay tuned for an upcoming journal on the process of Reverse Osmosis and more on the machine Chip built.
Chip is in Antarctica for a brief time, only three weeks, but he is packing a lot into this time- Happy Camper School, a few days out at Lake Fryxell, a trip to the penguin rookery at Cape Royds, seal sightings, and a whole bunch more! He is hoping to return next year for a longer period, but this year he is anxious to get home to start skiing with his family and enjoying the holidays with...
I had the greatest of intentions to share a glimpse into the life of another DOM team member today through my "Interview with an Antarctician" videos, but both Yo and Chip found themselves very busy preparing water samples and equipment in anticipation of lots of great lab work in the weeks ahead. Just as I was beginning to despair that I would have no fabulous event or idea to share with all of you today, Yo came zooming into the lab to let me know that there were Weddell seals on the ice very close to the edge of town. YeeHaw! I love seals and knew I could get within range of a few decent photos. Whew, I found my subject for the day and a better topic than writing about how I spent 8 hours filtering dirty water through a very fine meshed filter.
Smile
Sarah and Weddell Seals...
During the PolarTREC Live from the IPY! webinar on Wednesday, my wonderful mom asked a great question that I unfortunately never got around to answering. I apologize, Mom! She e-mailed me the question later in the day and I would like to answer it in this journal, and elaborate a little more.
My mom's question arose from a part of the webinar in which I mentioned that the Cotton Glacier stream changes dramatically over the course of the Antarctic summer. She wondered what the changes were and why they come about.
We first went to the Cotton Glacier on December 1 as part of a helicopter reconnaissance tour to see if the stream was flowing. We found two of the three stream sites we are hoping to sample from this year were flowing, but they were shallow, and not very wide.
Sampling the...
Mike, Collin, Yo, Chip, and I are working out of the McMurdo Station Crary Lab right now, while Heidi, Birgit and Christine are collecting water samples, ice cores and conducting tests from the Lake Fryxell Camp.
One of the DOM team's sampling streams.
We already have over 240L of water collected in 20L containers from the Cotton Glacier Streams and the Canada Stream. (Challenge questions: How many gallons of water are in 240L? How many 20L containers do you need to hold 240L of stream water?) There are a number of analyses we run on the water to determine the types of dissolved organic matter (DOM) and species of bacteria that reside within the stream system.
Today I would like to introduce you to one of the tests we perform on the sampled water and the purpose behind the analysis....
"THANK YOU!" to all who joined the DOM team's first webinar today. It was so wonderful for us to hear your voices, read you questions, and share our experiences with you. Your participation made the early webinar time (6am in Antarctica) well worth it for the whole DOM team. I was very excited that we were able to coordinate communication between the DOM teams at McMurdo and Lake Fryxell- it was cool to have the field and the lab team sharing our ideas with all of you during the same webinar. I encourage you all to post your unanswered questions from the webinar, or questions that popped into your head after the webinar was over, to the Ask the Team section of the DOM PolarTREC page. The DOM team really enjoys your questions and the challenge of answering them concisely and...
Everyone on the DOM team slept in a little today, since we did not get to sleep until well after one in the morning.
Today, our plans to visit the Canada Stream for more sampling and to check on the glass slides Heidi left in the stream were thwarted by visits to Lake Fryxell Camp by a gaggle of visitors. We had helicopters full of guests flying in and out of Camp all day long- some to film the DOM team for an educational Antarctica Environmental Compliance video, others to check out the efficiency of our lab buildings, a carpenter, and others to help us send our waste back to McMurdo Station. All in all, we had 10 visitors to Lake Fryxell Camp and over five helicopter visits. The DOM team just tried to lay low and keep out of the way of our visitors as they went about their required jobs...
Rise and shine DOM team! It is 4:00 in the morning at Lake Fryxell Camp. Time for us to take a half-hour walk down the frozen Lake to the Canada Stream to collect stream data, and four forty-five pound jugs of Canada Stream water. The jugs, called Carboys, were the reason for the early morning hike to the stream. We had to get the Carboys back to Camp by 9:00 am so a helicopter heading to McMurdo could pick them up and deliver them to two DOM team members working in our lab, Yo Chin and Chip Kilduff. Yo and Chip arrived at McMurdo the day the rest of the DOM team took off for Lake Fryxell. While we are out at Camp collecting stream data and water, Chip and Yo are setting up other science equipment at the McMurdo lab.
Heidi and Birgit
With the Carboys of Canada Stream water safely...
